Kindergarten Week 3 {FIAR} Storm in the Night

When I looked at the upcoming weather for last week and saw there were several days of storms ahead, I knew it was the perfect time to row Storm in the Night by Mary Stolz!

Math:

Libby is plugging along with number bonds. We played several review games this week with the linking cubes, this seems to help the information stick better.  Ian is working on the concept of ‘sets’ in his Singapore K workbook.

Handwriting:

Elizabeth did letters V, W and Y this week in her Zaner Bloser workbook, while Ian finished up his colors in HWT PreK.

Reading:

Elizabeth learned the ‘Wh’ phonogram and did several practice reading sheets, as well as a game where she fed fish (with words on the back) to a whale!  She really loves the games included in All About Reading Level 2.  Ian continued to work on rhyming words, playing several games of concentration, and also reviewed the sounds for letters G and H.

Learning Through Literature: {FIAR} Storm in the Night

We loved the illustrations throughout this book about a boy and his grandfather in a storm.  The dialogue between them was interesting, and we watched as they both overcame their fears.  We also fell in love with one of our go-along books this week: Thundercake by Patricia Polacco.  I do think our family enjoyed this second book more than the first, maybe because we identified with the book being set in Michigan and about a little girl and her grandmother baking a cake – well, we like cake 🙂  So it was no surprise we loved this book!  We ended up reading each book twice this week.

Social Studies:

We placed our story disk on Michigan because this is where Thundercake took place, and also because it is where our grandparents live, as well.

We talked about our fears, and read a book about being afraid.  Libby said that when she is scared, she will snuggle her cubby and bunny and talk to mom and dad about it.

Language Arts:

We learned what an onomatopia is, and listed several ‘storm sounds’ for our notebook.  I also pointed out the quotion marks and explained that they are used to show people talking.  We also saw that we can write words in all capital letters to emphasize them: BOOM!

Science:

We read two books from the Lets-Read-And-Find-Out series for kids: Clouds and Crash, Flash, Rumble and Roll about thunderstorms.  We also watched two videos on BrainPOP about clouds and thunderstorms.

We used this information to make a cotton ball craft showing three different types of clouds:

When storm clouds began to roll in, we went outside to check them out.  We were able to count the seconds between lightening and thunder to tell us how many miles away the storm was – just like in Thundercake.  Once the rain started and the wind picked up, we headed back inside to make our own Thundercake!  We even used the special ingredient – tomato puree!

We also played in ‘cloud dough’ which was just flour and baby oil mixed together.  Elizabeth LOVES stuff like this.  Ian preferred to kick his ball around and play in the hose 🙂

We also took a trip to the beach this week, which was fun because I had been reading Before Five in a Row book Yellow Ball to Ian throughout the week, which takes place at the beach and there is a storm in it as well.  We had a fun week!